Hemingway's Gang

The True Story of the Booze, Bullfights, and Brawls That Inspired Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway’s debut novel gave a voice to the Lost Generation—often by lifting it directly from his affluent expat circle in post-war Paris. A new book by Lesley M. M. Blume recounts the scandalous trip to Pamplona that inspired Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley, Robert Cohn, and the characters from literature’s greatest roman à clef.

In the middle of June 1925, Ernest Hemingway sat down to write. He pulled out a stenographer’s notebook, otherwise used for list-making. The back contained a rundown of letters he “must write”; intended recipients included Ezra Pound—a mentor of his—and his Aunt Grace. Also scribbled there: a list of stories the 25-year-old writer, who had moved to Paris in 1921, had recently submitted to various publications. On this day, he opened the notebook to a fresh page and scrawled in pencil across the top:

Along with Youth

A Novel

He began writing a sea adventure, set on a troop transport ship in 1918 and featuring a character named Nick Adams. Exactly two months earlier, Hemingway had informed Maxwell Perkins, an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, the prestigious publishing house in New York City, that he considered the novel to be an artificial and played-out genre. (Perkins had heard through the grapevine that Hemingway was doing some remarkable writing.) Yet here he was, making a bid to jump-start one.

It was not his first attempt. Hemingway’s literary ambition at this time was seemingly limitless—yet he was still a frustrated nobody as far as the wider public was concerned. He had long been trying to sell his experimental stories to publishers back in the States, with no success. F. Scott Fitzgerald—then the celebrated oracle of the Jazz Age and the friend who had been championing Hemingway to Perkins at Scribner’s—published practically everywhere, but no commercial publication or publisher would touch Hemingway. So far, he’d managed to place stories with small literary magazines; his first book, Three Stories & Ten Poems, was published in 1923 in a run of merely 300 copies. When Hemingway’s second book, In Our Time, appeared in 1924, only 170 copies were available for sale.

“I knew I would have to write a novel,” he later recalled. After all, this is what Fitzgerald had done. Before Fitzgerald had published his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920, he too had been a regular in the slush pile. After Perkins brought out This Side of Paradise with Scribner’s, Fitzgerald remembered later, “editors and publishers were open to me, impresarios begged plays, the movies panted for screen material.” This was precisely the sort of success that Hemingway craved, and a blockbuster novel was key.

Already there had been two false starts. When Hemingway and his wife, Hadley, had moved to Paris, four years earlier, he had taken along with him the pages of a starter novel—which Hadley lost in a careless accident, along with most of his other “Juvenilia,” as he described the writings to Ezra Pound. He then hatched and abandoned an idea for another novel, satirizing a dictatorial colleague at the Toronto Star, where Hemingway had worked as a deadline reporter.

Along with Youth was destined to peter out after 27 pages. Hemingway decided that he would simply have to “let the pressure build”: when the moment came, his debut novel would simply happen. “When I had to write it,” he later recalled, “then it would be the only thing to do and there would be no choice.”

Little did he know that, at that moment, in June 1925, all of the elements were falling into place at last; he was just one fateful event away from getting the material he so desperately needed to join the novel club. With the resulting book—which would come to be called The Sun Also Rises, published 90 years ago this year—Hemingway would capture several coveted prizes: he would essentially broker for mainstream audiences a new era of modern writing, find himself dubbed the voice of a “Lost Generation,” and become launched as an international sensation.

More immediately on the horizon, though, was the month of July, which for Hemingway meant an annual trip to Pamplona, Spain, to take part in the San Fermin bullfighting festival. The bulls had become an obsession over the last few years. “He [first] heard about bullfighting from me,” Gertrude Stein later sniffed, but several friends had played a role in getting him hooked. He had gone to the Pamplona fiesta twice before. The first time, in 1923, it had been a romantic adventure for him and Hadley: at the bullfights, Hemingway had been enraptured (it was like “having a ringside seat at the war with nothing going to happen to you,” he wrote to a friend); Hadley—then pregnant with their son—had sat calmly at his side, stitching clothes for their baby and “embroidering in the presence of all that brutality,” as she later put it.

In 1924, the couple returned with a raucous entourage that included writers John Dos Passos and Donald Ogden Stewart. Pamplona still felt as pure and insular as it had the summer before, untainted by Americans and other tourists.

The town, Stewart wrote later, “was ours. No one else had discovered it. It was vintage Hemingway. It was a happy time.” No one was happier there than Hemingway. “He stuck like a leech till he had every phase of the business in his blood,” Dos Passos recalled, “and saturated himself to the bursting point.” It was a feeling Hemingway insisted his friends share. “[Hemingway] had an evangelistic streak,” Dos Passos went on, “that made him work to convert his friends to whatever mania he was encouraging at the time.”

The Hemingway crew started each sweltering day by slugging black coffee; they then moved on to Pernod. They lost one another in the bacchanal and found one another again—sometimes not until the following day. Every night, the drinking continued until the sun came up or you passed out, whichever came first. Hemingway goaded his friends into the bullring for amateur fights. “Ernest was somebody you went along with, or else,” Stewart noted. Their feats in the ring earned Stewart a few broken ribs and some breathless coverage in newspapers back home.

Hemingway now started rounding up a new fiesta entourage for the 1925 excursion. Stewart agreed to make a return appearance. Another expat who made the cut: the 34-year-old writer Harold Loeb, the product of Princeton (where he boxed and wrestled) and two of New York’s wealthiest and most prominent Jewish families. (Peggy Guggenheim was his cousin.) Loeb met Hemingway at a party in 1924 and became one of his tennis friends and most ardent supporters. In Loeb’s eyes, Hemingway was cool and unpretentious, with “a shy, disarming smile” and a “zest for living.” As he would remember years later, “I thought never before had I encountered an American so unaffected by living in Paris.”

By June 1925, however, Loeb was keeping a secret from his friend: he was having an illicit affair with a British expat named Lady Duff Twysden. One spring afternoon, Loeb had stationed himself at the Select, the Montparnasse café near the Dôme and the Rotonde, working on revisions to a novel. “I heard a laugh so gay and musical that it seemed to brighten the dingy room,” he would later write. “Low-pitched, it had the liquid quality of the lilt of a mockingbird singing to the moon.” He glanced up and spotted a long, lean woman perched on a barstool, surrounded by men. Her light hair had been shorn into a boyish cut; though she sometimes favored rakishly angled men’s fedoras, on this day she wore a slouch hat. A simple jersey sweater and tweed skirt completed the ensemble. Her strong, spare features were devoid of makeup. All in all, it seemed a fairly chaste presentation, almost masculine, yet she was arresting and sexy. This woman had, Loeb thought, a “certain aloof splendor.”

Loeb was merely the latest man intrigued by the charms of Lady Duff: she had been captivating men throughout the Quarter. “We were all in love with her,” recalled Stewart. “It was hard not to be. She played her cards so well.” Lady Duff had acquired her title by marriage, but was soon to lose it: like many other expat ladies in Paris, dubbed the “alimony gang,” she had come to Paris to weather a nasty divorce from an aristocratic husband—Sir Roger Thomas Twysden, a naval officer and baronet—who’d remained back in the U.K. Though a notoriously hard drinker, she handled her liquor admirably for such a fashionably gaunt creature. “I wondered how long she could keep it up without losing her looks,” Loeb wrote.

Despite the English title, there was said to be something feral about Lady Duff; some maintained that she didn’t bother to bathe regularly. She was gregarious—one of the boys—but also exuded an air of unattainability, a necessary attribute for any successful siren. Men followed Lady Duff wherever she went—including Hemingway.

“I [introduced] Hemingway to Lady Duff and the title seemed to electrify him,” claimed Robert McAlmon, an acid-tongued expat writer and editor, years later. After that, Hemingway was seen for weeks on end in Montmartre, buying drinks for both her and her official paramour, Patrick Guthrie, a dissipated thirtysomething Briton who subsisted on checks from his rich mother back in Scotland. Sometimes Hadley joined these excursions with Lady Duff, but they were not happy outings for her. She often burst into tears, and Hemingway would prevail upon McAlmon or their friend Josephine Brooks to take his wife home while he stayed out drinking with Lady Duff.

“I am coming on the Pamplona trip with Hem and your lot. . . . With Pat of course,” Lady Duff wrote to Loeb. “Can you bear it?”

Hemingway had written Loeb a jovial note about the upcoming Pamplona trip, promising it would be “damned good.” Now, after a flurry of letters back and forth among Hemingway, Loeb, and Lady Duff, Loeb was left with a “low feeling which I could not shake off.” This feeling was replaced with one of genuine foreboding when he received yet another missive from Lady Duff. “I expect I shall have a bit of time managing the situation,” she wrote, adding, “Hem has promised to be good and we ought to have really a marvelous time.”

Loeb was dumbfounded. Why on earth had Hemingway pledged good behavior? Was he sleeping with Duff now as well?

Hemingway had, in any case, learned about her liaison with Loeb. Their secret had been working its way through the Left Bank gossip mill. When a mutual friend told Hemingway the news, he had been furious. Everyone around the Quarter began to wonder, like Loeb, if Hemingway was sleeping with Lady Duff. The upcoming Pamplona trip was starting to look like a powder keg.

Yet no one backed out. Hemingway, Loeb, and Lady Duff all put on their best poker faces. “By all means come,” Loeb replied to Lady Duff with affected breeziness. He even pledged to escort her and Guthrie to Pamplona.

In the meantime, Hemingway and Hadley dispatched their 21-month-old son, Bumby, to Brittany with his nanny, packed their bags, and left Paris, heading to a quiet, remote Basque village in the Pyrenees called Burguete to kick off the Pamplona holiday with a week of trout fishing. But the trout were in no position to oblige them. A logging company had destroyed the local pools, broken down dams, and run logs down the river. The loggers’ trash was everywhere. Hemingway was in despair over the sight. It was not an auspicious start to the excursion.

Loeb skipped Burguete and went to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, where he was to meet Lady Duff and Guthrie. He grew upset the moment Lady Duff stepped off the train onto the platform. Instead of her usual man’s fedora, she was wearing a beret. “I did not like her in a beret,” Loeb grumbled. “Hem usually wore a beret.” Like Hemingway, Guthrie had now been apprised of the Loeb–Lady Duff interlude. Unlike Hemingway, he had no intention of pretending not to know. “Oh, you’re here, are you?” he said, greeting Loeb on the platform with a breezy snarl.

The party immediately repaired to the station bar, which Loeb and Lady Duff had graced together just a few weeks earlier. Three martinis later, Guthrie adjourned to the pissoir. Loeb began to interrogate Lady Duff. Her behavior toward him had changed, he said. What had happened?

“Pat broke the spell,” she told him. “He worked hard at it.”

“I see,” Loeb responded quietly. The trio hired a car for the awkward 50-mile journey to Pamplona. When they reached the Hotel Quintana, where Hemingway had booked rooms for the entourage, Lady Duff and Guthrie went to one room and Loeb to another. Hemingway, Hadley, and the Burguete group arrived the next morning in similarly petulant spirits.

A round of absinthe, a large Spanish lunch, and a walk through the town helped alleviate the atmosphere, but already it was clear that the jubilance of the previous year was probably not going to be repeated. First of all, Pamplona itself had changed. Just as Paris had become overrun with tourists, Pamplona now also included the appalling presence of some of the group’s compatriots. “We were no longer the exclusive foreign participants in the show,” Stewart later observed. “The establishment had caught up with the frontier.”

Rolls-Royces now idled outside the hotel. The American ambassador materialized in a limousine; to Hemingway, the functionary’s presence at the festival seemed particularly intrusive and symbolic of the shift. The town suddenly felt “cluttered and ordinary,” Stewart recalled. “Pamplona seemed to be getting ready for the hand of Elsa Maxwell”—one of the era’s most prominent gossip columnists.

Yet Lady Duff would prove the most disruptive intruder of all. “Someone had left the door open and Eve had walked into my male Garden of Eden,” wrote Stewart. Suddenly, in her presence, “Ernest had changed,” he noted. “Hadley wasn’t the same . . . the fun was going out of everybody.” That is, except for one person: Lady Duff, who looked especially beautiful and aloof that first morning in a broad-brimmed Spanish hat.

The next day, everyone scraped themselves out of bed in time to see the bulls driven from their corral to the stadium, with the usual crowd of men scrambling ahead of the herd. When the bullring was opened for the amateur hour, Hemingway, Loeb, and Hemingway’s childhood friend Bill Smith leapt in. The press corps was on hand, including photographers.

Hemingway, wearing a beret and white pants, got right down to the business of baiting the bulls. One bull knocked Smith down; it then turned and faced Loeb, who took off his sweater and waved it at the animal. The bull charged; its horn caught the sweater, which dangled from the bull’s head as it then galloped around the arena.

The real bullfights began that afternoon. In front of the Hemingway crew, a bull gored a horse, which took a death-throes run through the arena, trailing its intestines. At another point, a bull tried to escape by jumping over the wall surrounding the ring. “Perhaps he felt that it wasn’t his party,” Loeb said. He became increasingly dismayed by the spectacle; he even “considered oléing the bulls that refused to charge,” he recalled. “It seemed, in some obscure way, shameful.”

After the fight, the entourage reconvened on a café terrace. The fiesta was in full swing. Hundreds of people filled the main square, along with the relentless thump of drums and shrill piping of fifes. Hemingway asked Loeb what he thought of his first bullfight. When Loeb replied that he was not “too keen on the theme,” Hemingway was predictably unsympathetic. “We all have to die,” Loeb told him, “but I don’t like to be reminded of it more than twice a day.”

“Balls,” Hemingway said, and then turned his back on him. Being less than reverential about bullfighting was one of the surest ways to antagonize Hemingway. The only worse offense might be stealing the limelight from him. Later, when Hemingway, Guthrie, and Stewart were swept up in a parade streaming in an endless circuit around the square, Loeb began to quiz Hemingway’s old friend Bill Smith. “Hem seems to be bitter about something,” he ventured. Smith cut to the chase. Hemingway was angry about Loeb’s fling with Lady Duff. When Loeb pressed Smith about whether Hemingway was also in love with Lady Duff, Smith refused to give a straight answer. The conversation abruptly ended when Loeb realized that Lady Duff and Hadley—sitting together at the far end of the table—had gone silent. Loeb quickly changed the subject. If Hadley had indeed overheard the chat and entertained her own suspicions about a possible affair between her husband and Lady Duff, she appears to have kept them to herself.

In the morning, Hemingway, Loeb, and Smith headed back to the bullring for amateur hour. To spare his wardrobe any further indignities, Loeb came armed with a hotel towel. This time when a bull charged him, there was no chance to get out of the way. Loeb dropped the towel, and as the bull lowered its head to butt him, Loeb turned around, grasped its horns, and sat on the bull’s head.

The bull loped across the arena and eventually tossed Loeb into the air. Miraculously, he landed on his feet, as though the entire episode had been a choreographed stunt. The crowd went mad; photographers caught his moment of glory. Hemingway, not to be outdone, then emerged from the sidelines and approached a bull
from behind. He grabbed the animal and then managed to catch hold of its horns and wrestle it to the ground. The other amateur bullfighters closed in on the downed bull. “For an instant it looked as if they would tear the animal’s limbs off,” Loeb reported in horror, but ring attendants came to the rescue.

Yet despite Hemingway’s herculean feat, Loeb was the king of the ring, treated like a hero around town. Apparently the locals were in awe of the first man (or the first foreigner, anyway) in living memory who had ridden a bull’s head. His newfound fame even carried across the Atlantic: pictures of Loeb perched atop the bull, legs scissoring in the air, eventually appeared in New York publications. Hemingway had been outshone—and by a man who scoffed at the whole sport.

But Loeb’s heroics weren’t enough to win Lady Duff back. She visited him in his room before lunch that day and told him that she was sorry he was having such a tough time on her account. She was worth it, Loeb replied and tried to embrace her, only to be rejected yet again. He thought of leaving Pamplona, but it would look as if he was running away.

That evening he cornered Lady Duff in the Plaza del Castillo and finally persuaded her to come have a drink alone with him. They walked off together to a small café and then got swept into a private party in one of the buildings overlooking the plaza. As the festivities stretched into the night, Loeb unsuccessfully tried to wrench Lady Duff away from the party. He drank himself into oblivion and woke up the next morning in his bed with no memory of having come back to the Hotel Quintana.

Loeb staggered out to meet Hemingway and the crew for lunch. Guthrie was in an ugly mood, Hadley had lost her kindly smile, and Smith wore a grim look. Lady Duff turned up later, accessorized not with a beret or a fedora, but rather with a black eye and a bruised forehead. Loeb demanded to know what had happened to her, but before she could respond, Hemingway interrupted, saying that she had fallen. No one else—including Lady Duff—offered an explanation, and Loeb made no further inquiries. Once again he considered leaving the fiesta, but once again he was afraid of looking like a coward. He stayed put.

As usual, Loeb noted, “there was too much lunch.”

The one bright, joyous presence in that week was Hemingway’s new friend, Cayetano Ordoñez, a 19-year-old matador who had been thrilling aficionados throughout Spain. “He was sincerity and purity of style itself with the cape,” Hemingway wrote of him later, adding that he “looked like the messiah who had come to save bullfighting if ever any one did.” When Ordoñez was awarded a bull’s ear after a particularly good corrida, he gave it to Hadley. “[She] wrapped it up in a handkerchief which, thank God was Don Stewarts [sic],” Hemingway reported to Gertrude Stein. Hemingway, however, was probably less than delighted when Ordoñez praised Loeb’s performance in the ring.

On the second-to-last evening in Pamplona, Hemingway informed his friends that Ordoñez had assured him that the following day’s bulls were going to be the best in Spain. They were all were sitting around a café table in the square after dinner, drinking brandy. As Loeb recalled, Hemingway then turned to him and said, “I suppose you’d like it better if they shipped in goats.” Loeb was close to losing his temper. He responded that while he didn’t dislike bullfighting he simply sympathized with the victims. Guthrie snickered. “Our sensitive chum is considerate of the bull’s feelings,” he said. “But what about ours?”

The situation was coming to a head. Hemingway accused Loeb of ruining their party. Guthrie sputtered “Why don’t you get out? I don’t want you here. Hem doesn’t want you here. Nobody wants you here, though some may be too decent to say so.”

Loeb asked Hemingway to step outside. Hemingway followed him. Loeb was scared to fight his friend in the dark. Firstly, Hemingway outweighed him by 40 pounds. Secondly, Loeb could usually tell when Hemingway’s punches were coming by the way his pupils “jiggled,” and in the dark he wouldn’t be able to see his eyes. Perhaps more disorienting was the realization that Hemingway had gone so quickly from being a close friend to a “bitter, lashing enemy.” The two men marched toward the edge of the plaza and walked down a few steps onto an ill-lit street. Loeb took off his jacket and slipped his glasses in the side pocket. He squinted around, looking for a safe place to put the garment.

“My glasses,” he explained to Hemingway. “If they’re broken I couldn’t get them fixed here.”

To Loeb’s surprise, he looked up and saw Hemingway smiling. It was a boyish, contagious smile—and even in that moment, that grin made it hard for Loeb to dislike him. He even offered to hold Loeb’s jacket. Loeb then offered to hold his. Their mutual rage seeped away. The men unclenched their fists, put their jackets on, and walked back through the plaza. “Duff,” Loeb later wrote, “no longer seemed to matter.”

The next morning, Loeb received a note from Hemingway. “I was terribly tight and nasty to you last night,” he wrote. He wished that he could wipe out what had happened, he went on, adding that he was ashamed of his behavior and of the “stinking, unjust uncalled for things I said.”

Loeb turned up at lunch and afterward accepted Hemingway’s apology in person. He hoped they could be friends as before, he told him. “But I knew we wouldn’t be,” he wrote later. He couldn’t have guessed that Hemingway would soon do something that would link them for the rest of their lives and beyond.

Mercifully, it was time to depart. Stewart, who was heading next to Sara and Gerald Murphy’s villa on the Riviera, later wrote, “It occurred to me that the events of the past week might make interesting material for a novel.” He was not the only one to think so.

For Hemingway, the events in Pamplona had become practically priceless. Here was the heaven-sent trigger he had been waiting for. “Let the pressure build,” he had told himself. “When I had to write [a novel], then it would be the only thing to do and there would be no choice.” He had now reached that point. Just when the pressure surrounding him as a virtually unknown writer had built to an almost intolerable level—financial woes, living with Hadley in squalor, fears of obscurity, excruciating writer’s block—Lady Duff Twysden had saved the day. As Hemingway watched her at the fiesta—a jezebel in Arcadia, manipulating her suitors like marionettes—he knew that he had figured out the puzzle at last.

A story began to shape itself in Hemingway’s mind—the intense, poignant story that, in short order, would become The Sun Also Rises. Suddenly every Pamplona confrontation, insult, hangover, and bit of frazzled sexual tension took on literary currency. Once he started working, he could not stop. He and Hadley moved into the Pensión Aguilar, in Madrid, where he wrote furiously in the mornings. During the afternoons, he went with Hadley to the bullfights. The next morning he would begin again. “Have been working like hell,” he reported to Bill Smith a week after the fiesta had broken up.

By early August, he started letting it be known that he was officially about to join the novel club. Expatriate bookseller and publisher Sylvia Beach, of the bookstore Shakespeare and Company, was the first to get the news. “I’ve written six chapters on [sic] a novel and am going great,” he wrote to her. By that time, he and Hadley had moved on to Valencia; they had seen 17 bullfights, and he had completed 15,000 words on loose-leaf paper. His handwriting—smooth, even, and upright—belied the urgency with which the story poured out of him.

Hemingway’s tale was a précis of dialogue and events that had gone down in Pamplona—from his conversations with Quintana and Ordoñez to his aversion to the American ambassador to the affair between Lady Duff and Loeb, who, he wrote, “was in love with Duff and she had slept with him while Pat was away in Scotland and told Pat about it and it had not seemed to make any difference but now whenever he got drunk he kept coming back to it. She had slept with other men before but they had not been of Harold’s race and had not come on parties afterwards.”

Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

All of the Pamplona entourage appeared under their own names in this draft. Guthrie was depicted as drunk and belligerent, repeatedly informing Ordoñez that “bulls have no balls.” Stewart was the resident jester. Lady Duff smoldered and quipped and undressed the handsome Ordoñez with her eyes; her probable corruption of the young bullfighter—and her corrupting potential in general—promised almost unlimited dramatic potential.

Not only did the book depict in painful detail events that had transpired in Pamplona (and Paris), but vast swaths of their personal backgrounds had been blatantly used as the characters’ biographies. Hemingway generally declined to warn his characters’ real-life prototypes that they were about to star in his big literary coup. But one evening he leaked the news to Kitty Cannell, the expat fashion writer who happened to be Loeb’s former girlfriend (and another one of the novel’s unwitting models). Back in Paris, some of the Pamplona crew gathered for dinner one night to make amends. Nerves were still raw from the fiesta, which had concluded nearly two months earlier. After dinner, the group walked to a café. Hemingway and Cannell were strolling together when he suddenly made a startling admission. “I’m writing a book,” he told her. “Everybody’s in it. And I’m going to tear these two bastards apart,” he added, indicating Loeb and Smith, who were walking along nearby. Furthermore, Hemingway informed her, “that kike Loeb is the villain.”

In due time, they were all assigned their familiar fictional names, but they remained identifiable. Loeb was the hapless, insufferable Robert Cohn. Lady Duff was translated into the glamorous but anguished Lady Brett Ashley. The caricature permanently branded her as an “alcoholic nymphomaniac” as Hemingway would later unapologetically refer to her. Stewart and Smith were combined into the wry Bill Gorton. Guthrie became Mike Campbell. Hemingway poured in details about his friends’ failed past marriages, college sporting activities, speaking idiosyncrasies, and assorted indiscretions.

He also inserted a version of himself into the manuscript, at first under the name Hem. The character would become Jake Barnes. In Hemingway’s pages, both Loeb/Cohn and Hemingway/Jake fall in love with Duff/Brett. And in Hemingway’s pages, Loeb/Cohn has an affair with Duff/Brett, which drives a wedge between Loeb/Cohn and Hemingway/Jake, who happens to be impotent, thanks to a war wound.

It was a bold decision to make about a character who would surely be read as the author’s alter ego—especially one created by a writer known for goading friends into bullrings. Hemingway eventually downplayed the gravitas of his choice. “Impotence is a pretty dull subject compared with war or love or the old lucha por la vida [life struggle],” he would later write to Max Perkins. But Jake’s impotence made it clear that Hemingway was willing to take wild risks—even ones that might even compromise his personal dignity, for there would certainly be assumptions that he had based Jake’s condition on Hemingway’s own well-known wartime injuries. Though he had already been enjoying an almost aggressively masculine image—one that was about to prove immensely bankable—he would be the first to challenge that image if doing so would serve his art.

He soon put this loose-leaf draft aside, but a good deal of material from these first pages would eventually be transplanted wholesale into The Sun Also Rises. His vision was startlingly clear from the beginning. Earlier that spring, Hemingway had described his ingenious something-for-everyone writing formula to publisher Horace Liveright, who had brought out his collection In Our Time: “My book will be praised by highbrows and can be read by lowbrows,” he had written. “There is no writing in it that anybody with a high-school education cannot read.”

The Sun Also Rises—which Scribner’s would publish in October of 1926 to rapturous reviews (The New York Times would call it “an event”)—magnificently showcased Hemingway’s “highbrow-lowbrow” formula. Its terse, innovative prose would titillate the literary crowd, and the simplicity of the style would make it accessible to mainstream readers. “It is a hell of a fine novel,” Hemingway wrote to an editor acquaintance before the book came out, adding that it would “let these bastards who say yes he can write very beautiful little paragraphs know where they get off at.”

He was right. With the publication of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s generation—the generation Fitzgerald had written about in The Great Gatsby the year before—was informed that it was not giddy after all. It was simply lost. The Great War had ruined everyone, so everyone might as well start drinking even more—preferably in Paris and Pamplona. Back in America, the college set gleefully adopted the label of “the Lost Generation,” a term that Hemingway borrowed from Gertrude Stein and popularized with his novel, using it as an epigraph. The Sun Also Rises became the guidebook to youth culture. Parisian cafés teemed with Hemingway-inspired poseurs: the hard-drinking Jake Barnes and the studiously blasé Lady Brett Ashley became role models. The reason this pioneering youth movement still shimmers with dissipated glamour has a lot to do with The Sun Also Rises.

No one seemed a better representative of that lost world than Hemingway himself, thanks to the public-relations machine that plugged him as a personality along with his breakthrough novel, which would sell 19,000 copies within the first six months of its publication. (By the time of Hemingway’s death, in 1961, an estimated one million copies had been sold.) Those charged with marketing Hemingway’s work were aware of their good fortune: in a sense, they were getting two juicy stories for the price of one. It quickly became apparent that the public’s appetite for Hemingway was as great as that for his writing. Here was a new breed of writer—brainy yet brawny, a far cry from Proust and his dusty, sequestered ilk, or even the dandyish Fitzgerald. Charles Scribner III, a former director of Scribner’s, which published both Fitzgerald and Hemingway for the majority of their careers, said that Fitzgerald “was the last of the romantics. He was Strauss.” Hemingway, by contrast, was Stravinsky. In him, a truly modern literature had arrived.

The portraits would haunt Lady Duff and the others for the rest of their lives. (Duff would die of tuberculosis in Santa Fe in 1938.) But, for Hemingway, his friends were simply collateral damage. After all, he was revolutionizing literature, and in every revolution some heads must roll. And if readers weren’t interested in a revolution, they still got a scandalous roman à clef featuring dissolute representatives from the worlds of wealth and ambition.

“There is a lot of dope about high society in it,” Hemingway wryly noted. “And that is always interesting.”

An envelope addressed to Hemingway’s parents, Clarence and Grace Hall Hemingway, sent from Milan, Italy, during World War I.

“Dear Papa,” Hemingway wrote as a young boy, “today mama and the rest of us took a walk. We walked to the school house. . . . In the Wood Shed of the Scool house there was a porcupine. . . . I went in and gave I[t] a wack with the axx. Then I cave I[t] anthor and another. Then I crald in the wood.”
From the Special Collection Libraries/The Pennsylvania State University Library.

A letter to the Hemingway family sent from the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan, August 4, 1918.

After an Austrian trench mortar left him hospitalized, Hemingway wrote: “The surgeon says that my leg is coming on very good and he plans now to operate on the knee and right foot on August 15th.”
From the Special Collection Libraries/The Pennsylvania State University Library.

Page two of the letter to the Hemingway family.

“The master journalist was known to the crowd as the American Hero of the Piave. I’m nothing but a second Lieut. or Soto Tenente but all the Captains saluted me first.”
From the Special Collection Libraries/The Pennsylvania State University Library.

Page three of the letter to the Hemingway family.

“The silver medal is next to the highest Decoration that any man can receive. . . . It is higher than the French Croix D’Guerre and Medaille Militaire and ranks with the Legion of Honor they say.”
From the Special Collection Libraries/The Pennsylvania State University Library.

A letter to boyhood friend William B. Smith Jr., March 4, 1921.

“Well Smith you don’t write to your friends any more do you? . . . Do not be the rats that desert the stinking ship. Tho very shamed the writer be compared to the stinking ship. The writer does not stink.”
From the Hemingway Collection/The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

Page two of the letter to Smith.

“Some clippings—nay whole newspapers shall be dispatched to you. . . . Observe the fine style, the compactness, the virility, the artistry of the articles.”
From the Hemingway Collection/The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

Page three of the letter to Smith.

“Note how those articles writ by the writer excell those writ by others. The writer boosts himself. No one will boost the writer.”
From the Hemingway Collection/The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

An envelope addressed to Hemingway’s parents, Clarence and Grace Hall Hemingway, sent from Milan, Italy, during World War I.

“Dear Papa,” Hemingway wrote as a young boy, “today mama and the rest of us took a walk. We walked to the school house. . . . In the Wood Shed of the Scool house there was a porcupine. . . . I went in and gave I[t] a wack with the axx. Then I cave I[t] anthor and another. Then I crald in the wood.”
From the Special Collection Libraries/The Pennsylvania State University Library.

A letter to the Hemingway family sent from the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan, August 4, 1918.

After an Austrian trench mortar left him hospitalized, Hemingway wrote: “The surgeon says that my leg is coming on very good and he plans now to operate on the knee and right foot on August 15th.”
From the Special Collection Libraries/The Pennsylvania State University Library.

Page two of the letter to the Hemingway family.

“The master journalist was known to the crowd as the American Hero of the Piave. I’m nothing but a second Lieut. or Soto Tenente but all the Captains saluted me first.”
From the Special Collection Libraries/The Pennsylvania State University Library.

Page three of the letter to the Hemingway family.

“The silver medal is next to the highest Decoration that any man can receive. . . . It is higher than the French Croix D’Guerre and Medaille Militaire and ranks with the Legion of Honor they say.”
From the Special Collection Libraries/The Pennsylvania State University Library.

Page four of the letter to the Hemingway family.

“The rainbow trout up in Hortons Bay can thank the Lord there is a war on. But they will be all the bigger next summer.... Lots of love to all and kiss Dessie for me. Ernie.”
From the Special Collection Libraries/The Pennsylvania State University Library.

A letter to Hemingway’s mother, Grace, sent from Paris, February 14, 1922.

Hemingway moved to France with his wife, Hadley, in December 1921, from where he wrote: “We know a good batch of people now. . . . It is fun living in this oldest quarter of Paris and we have a wonderful time.”
From the Special Collection Libraries/The Pennsylvania State University Library.

Page two of the letter to Grace.

“Gertrude Stein who wrote Three Lives and a number of other good things was here to dinner last night and stayed till mid-night[.] She is about 55 I guess and very large and nice. She is very keen about my poetry.”
From the Special Collection Libraries/The Pennsylvania State University Library.

A letter to Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife, December 23, 1920.

“Could have much easier lied to you and mentioned acceptance of half a dozen New Years dates—all of which I’d have thrown out in a minute for a sight of you—but have always had this beautiful truth talking habit with you.”
From the Hemingway Collection/The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

Next page of the letter to Hadley.

“Saw tragedy tonight. I was in a drug shop opposite the Marigold Gardens and a girl was telephoning in a booth . . . talking cheerily away and all the time dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief—Poor kid.”
From the Hemingway Collection/The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

Following page of the letter to Hadley.

“‘Course I love you—I Love you all the time—when I wake up in the morning and have to climb out of bed and splash around and shave—I look at your picture and think about you.”
From the Hemingway Collection/The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

Subsequent page of the letter to Hadley.

“‘Night my dearest Hash—I’d like to hold you so and kiss you so that you wouldn’t doubt whether I wanted to or not.”
From the Hemingway Collection/The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

A letter to boyhood friend William B. Smith Jr., March 4, 1921.

“Well Smith you don’t write to your friends any more do you? . . . Do not be the rats that desert the stinking ship. Tho very shamed the writer be compared to the stinking ship. The writer does not stink.”
From the Hemingway Collection/The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

Page two of the letter to Smith.

“Some clippings—nay whole newspapers shall be dispatched to you. . . . Observe the fine style, the compactness, the virility, the artistry of the articles.”
From the Hemingway Collection/The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

Page three of the letter to Smith.

“Note how those articles writ by the writer excell those writ by others. The writer boosts himself. No one will boost the writer.”
From the Hemingway Collection/The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.